The WWW Virtual Library

General Reference

The Arts

The Artchive : Articles on artists, styles, periods, and other categories; well illustrated and including bibliographic citations. The text is from various published works; the illustrations are from original scans.
scope: over 200 artists; 2,600 scans; international; ancient to modernpublisher: Mark Harden

Encyclopedia of Western Signs and Ideograms : Online version of Carl G Liungman's Thought Signs: the Semiotics of Symbols - Western Non-pictorial Ideograms, IOS Press. 1,600 articles giving the history, use and meaning of the symbols. Limited to ideograms: graphical symbols and signs that are not pictures of easily recognized objects.
scope: more than 2,500 symbols
publisher: Symbols.com, HME Media

Great Buildings Collection : Photographs, architectural drawings and 3D walkthrough models with articles, biographies and bibliographies. An abridged version of the Great Buildings Collection CD-ROM, Artifice, Inc.
scope: More than 800 buildings, international
publisher: Kevin Matthews, Artifice, Inc.

Instrument Encyclopedia : Based on artifacts from the Stearns Collection at the University of Michigan, including sound files and bibliographic citations.
scope: more than 140; world
publisher: CHICO, School of Information, University of Michigan

World Art Treasures : A series of thematic presentations called Itineraries, some with audio.
scope: based on 100,000 slides; ancient to modern; international
publisher: Fondation Jacques-Edouard Berger

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names : A structured vocabulary with an emphasis on art and architecture, covering continents, nations, historical places and physical features. Each record includes geographic coordinates, notes, sources for the data, and the role of the place (e.g., inhabited place, state capital). Names can include the vernacular, English, other languages, historical names, natural order, and inverted order.
scope: around 1,000,000 entries; current and historical; international
publisher: Getty Research Institute

Gale's Literary Index : A master index to 40 of Gales's literary series. Main entries cover the author's name, any pseudonyms or variant names, and titles, with bibliographic citations.
scope: more than 130,000 authors and 140,000 titles
publisher: The Gale Group